Description of the Related Art
It is known that mailpieces produced by a bulk mailer for several thousand recipients can be grouped together by the mailer, upstream from the inward sorting at the postal operator's facility, in batches corresponding to main geographical destinations for delivery or inward sorting.
This enables the postal operator to process each batch of pre-sorted mailpieces directly at the postal delivery or inward-sorting center that corresponds to the geographical zone of the batch without having to perform an outward-sorting pass.
During the machine inward sorting, the process of automatically recognizing the delivery addresses on the mailpieces uses all-destination OCR that searches the entire file of postal addresses at national level, which involves long processing time, especially if that requires video coding operations.
When the outward sorting is performed by the postal operator, the inward sorting is started while the mailpieces are being transported from the outward-sorting center to the inward-sorting center in order to save processing time.
With pre-sorted mail, there is no outward sorting, and so the entire processing time for recognizing the addresses must take place at the inward-sorting center, which gives rise to high operating costs for said inward-sorting center.